Performance Improvements Boost Business Productivity

Client Objectives:Client was experiencing systematic performance challenges throughout their IT infrastructure and business-critical manufacturing applications. After months of troubleshooting, the Client had exhausted their internal resources.

Solution:Heraflux reviewed their entire IT architecture, including storage, virtualization, databases, and applications, and implemented a number of systematic changes designed to relieve bottlenecks and improve the operational efficiency to these critical processes.

Heraflux helped to review our entire IT infrastructure, from top to bottom, and uncovered key bottlenecks that we never knew about. After cleaning those up, our users saw serious gains in performance of our critical systems. Our daily reports have never run faster! Thank you!

Situation

Client is a leading provider of industrial automation, process control, automation, and fluid power products. Client manufactures a broad product lineup that serves industries including oil and gas, refining, power generation, electronics, transportation, biotechnology, water treatment, food and beverage, and mining.

A number of the business-critical applications that empower daily business operations were running well below expected performance, which was leading to the loss of staff productivity and impacting the business growth. With more than 300 connected users at any given time, any delays in the system caused the business to slow down, and at the end of the day, staff were forced to work late to accomplish their tasks for the day. Customer service satisfaction ratings showed that the sluggish system was turning off current and prospective clients.

The IT team had spent months reviewing the datacenter systems but were unable to deliver significant performance gains to return the business to efficient operations. The challenges just seemed monumental, and the CIO was considering upgrading every single device in the datacenter in a last-ditch attempt to solve the problem.

The Client needed an outside specialist to review the architecture and inner workings of the datacenter to determine where the performance bottlenecks existed, establish the performance footprint of each system, correct the system design challenges, and demonstrate measured performance gains of these business-critical applications.

Solution

Heraflux learned quickly that the primary vended application that the business relied heavily upon was a significant resource consumer.

Heraflux performed a deep-dive systems review of the virtualization systems platform powering the database and application servers, and found that a few small misconfigurations in the virtual machine were causing the database server to struggle to balance the virtual CPU workloads. Windows Server was also experiencing some storage bottlenecking on the disk controller architecture, which was causing sluggish storage performance. The SQL Server databases were also experiencing significant internal process blocking because of oversights from the third-party software vendor’s database design.

The end result was critical reports now ran in seconds, users were no longer waiting on the application to respond, and the performance was constant throughout the day, no matter how many users were connected. Customer satisfaction improved, and staff trust in IT had never been stronger. Business operations shifted to the new normal.